Every year a number of leading organizations specialized in management and technology serving people and organizations run annual surveys to understand the challenges and opportunities that are top of mind for leaders and heads of organizations. Over the last 10 years, the topic continues to be ‘people’. Finding the right people, engaging the employees, adapting to the dynamics of change, middle management development, work force planning and most recently, skilling and preparing a workforce that is ready for the new world of work, that we are a part of.
Additionally, a word trending in every organization, irrespective of size or industry, is the topic of access to data. How is it being used? How can data be read and interpreted? To what level is the interpretation of the data subjective (or objective)? How does it help in improving performance (of the employee as well as the business)? how aligned is the organization to the objectives it has drawn out, be they short or long term? How does this reflect on the future decisions that need to be taken?
The talent market is becoming tighter by the day; with the dynamics of what we need to know, at a pace faster than we are all comfortable with, in addition to the new skills required by every job, be they the foundational skills needed to do any type of job, such as collaboration, problem solving, dealing with ambiguity; to the technical skills required, such as analytics, customer centricity and relationship management. Learning needs to happen regularly, collaboratively and needs to be in tune with the dynamic changes of the work environment.
A lot of questions, very few answers. Technology has leaped in and managed to transform the way we think, do and how we make decisions in the different industries and domains, however very little has been done around the area of ‘people analytics’ and more specifically in the area of ‘predictive analytics’. My view is that predictive people analytics is the ability to think in 3 main dimensions; the matrices we use to manage the people priorities, combined with the matrices used to measure business success, against the strategic priorities of the organization. With the ability of machine learning, this is becoming a reality. The immediate priority lies in embracing this as a priority, encouraging innovation in this critical area and more profoundly organizations who have access to sizeable data, need to jump in and be the transformers!
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